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More natural caves followed, strewn haphazardly with bones, skulls perched wherever the processes that carved the chambers left any opportunity. The sense of dread built steadily but without any sudden shocks to the system.

Two hundred yards on and maybe fifty deeper, the biggest chamber yet waited, lit by a pale glow that revealed a cathedral-like architecture wrought by water and time, flowstone teeth meeting in columns, vaguely organic and coloured by faint sheens like the wings of ghostly butterflies.

A band across the centre had been levelled and paved, dividing the chamber like a boundary that Mollandra would have to cross in order to reach the passages leading from the far side. She approached slowly, burdened by the doom that haunted the space all around her, unseen but certain. She could see no source for the light, and it made her eyes ache.

Drawing closer, she could see that vast numbers of small bones had been used to mark out complex patterns, including several large circles surrounded by symbols spelled out in the frail white bones of children’s fingers.

Although the skulls were beyond sight now, Mollandra could feel their gaze upon her, the weight of their judgement suddenly a physical thing. She had broken the old lore on the very doorstep of the Academy on the day that she joined it. To kill one’s parents—there was no higher crime upon the Kindnesses’ lists. And she had taken their coins while her father’s corpse cooled by the roadside. She had been marked for failure since that day. And now the reckoning was here. She would never leave this place.

As she set foot on the boundary, Mollandra fell to her hands and knees. Everything that had come before was as nothing to this. She gripped the tooth in her pocket, and it burned fiercely cold. Drool hung from her panting lips as she fought to resist. Before, she’d battled the urge to run, but here the chance to run felt long gone. Here if she failed to eject this consuming nightmare from her mind, it would kill her. Her heart would beat itself into oblivion.

“It’s…just…” She spat and crawled one pace forward, then another. “…monsters…”

Tooth and claw, blade and skull, rot and horror—she had seen these things before. Death and the threat of death were no strangers to her or any acolyte. Whatever terrors stalked these caverns, be they of this world or any other, the instructors had worse waiting for her upstairs.

Another forward yard, about to pass between two of the bone circles. Without warning, the oldest and foulest of Mollandra’s memories invaded her, knocking aside the walls that cracked only in the depths of her worst nightmares. She fell on her side, curling in on herself to make a smaller target but finding no respite. This torture employed all the fears that were integral to the foundations of who she was.

At last, among all the many challenges of the Academy, Mollandra had met her match. She lay paralysed, unable to defeat herself, rigid with emotions that had surpassed fear and were driving her body beyond its limits. Memory strangled her. She was, once more, the tiny child hiding despite the inevitability of being found, the little girl pressing back into cupboards in rigid, unbreathing, desperate silence wanting only to be saved and never once believing salvation existed.

In this place of ghosts Bek and Einsa came not as spirits but as simple memory. A glimpse of their faces, their rare smiles breaking through the choking clouds of past and ever-present horror.

Mollandra sucked in a convulsive breath. Neither Bek nor Einsa had ever known that they had saved her, albeit far too late. Neither knew that what they offered, what they didn’t even consider kindness, let alone love, had been to her the key to the locked box of her life, a glimpse at another kind of world she hadn’t known existed.

A clenched hand opened. Sore eyes unscrewed and regarded the darkness. Mollandra thought of what had been taken from her, and by whom, and slowly, agonizingly slowly, converted the fear that had infected her back into the anger it had been.

She finished the crossing of the boundary on two feet, kicking aside the patterned bones without caring what harm might come.

The next cave marked the limit of Treecie’s bravery. The constant foulness of the air reached a new level in the tunnel leading down to the chamber. Breathing became difficult, and Mollandra decorated the stones with the part-digested remains of her breakfast. The atmosphere felt physically thicker.

At first Mollandra saw only Treecie, standing on the slime-slick rocks at the edge of a sickly green lake that stretched beyond the light of their lanterns. The girl watched her with pale resolve, hands empty. Mollandra, realizing that she should have picked up a weapon, even if only a loose rock or sharpened bone, began circling away to the left, following the wall.

She saw first one body and, while fighting the urge to retch again, saw another, then another, and understood that an unbroken mass of decomposing corpses lay on the cold stone, one overlapping the next. Each had been stripped of their acolytes’ robes, and Mollandra stifled a hysterical laugh at the realization that this must have been done in the name of economy. Heaven forfend the Academy should waste anything other than young lives…

Bodies lay in every stage of the journey from flesh and bone to just bone. Mollandra lowered her lantern before she had a chance to see whether one of them was Einsa, but not before she discerned that the slope of the rock shelf was sufficient to deliver the products of putrefaction into the water. It was even possible that the water wasn’t water at all.

A faint splash turned Mollandra’s head. Treecie had set her lantern down and stepped backwards into the lake. She stood almost to her knees in the foul brew, her robes floating around her.

“Look at what they’ve done to us…” Mollandra said. “Look at what they make us do.”

The same hysterical laugh that Mollandra had kept in broke free from Treecie, half of it wild terror.

In that moment Mollandra would have turned and left, swearing never to kill again save in self-defence. She would have let the Academy deliver any justice Treecie deserved, and that only if it could manage to do so before Mollandra managed to burn it down.

But Treecie retreated another step, the cold slime reaching her waist, and as she raised her hands the dead girls at the edges of the heap began to stir. Mollandra could see the shadows heaving at the periphery of the lanterns’ illumination. Soft, wet sounds accompanied the motion.

She could have run and let Treecie hunt her. Perhaps the girl’s control would weaken as she left the chamber. But Mollandra hadn’t given chase only to run away. Empty-handed, she followed Treecie into the pool.

Beneath the watery foulness and its floating fats the rocks descended in uneven steps, causing Mollandra to throw out her arms to keep herself from stumbling. Treecie, going backwards, had a tougher time of it and fell away with a strangled cry.

By the time she rose from her floundering panic the girl was shoulder-deep, her hair plastered across her forehead, gobbets of rot rolling down her cheeks.

Behind Mollandra, splashes announced the arrival of the first corpse. Rather than face the horrors animated by the rage that Treecie had returned to sour flesh, Mollandra threw herself at the focus of her own anger. She fastened both hands around Treecie’s scrawny neck.

As Mollandra dug her thumbs into the softness of the girl’s throat, Treecie’s fingernails sought her eyes. Mollandra ducked her head, and as Treecie tried to pull away, both of them went under.

Refusing panic, Mollandra clung on, knowing she had the advantage even if neither of them could breathe now. She tightened her grip and kept her mouth and eyes screwed shut.

When Treecie went limp Mollandra knew it was too early and held fast, imagining that desperation had driven the girl to try such weak deception.